This year, we decided to make simple play dough gifts for her little friends around our building. We borrowed the idea from one of my friends back home who brought pretty red heart-shaped cookie cutters filled with pink play dough to our most recent Valentine’s Day party (Hi, Tracy! ☺) I loved the idea as soon as I saw it, and filed it away in my mental list of ‘things to create in the future’. So when Gracen and I recently came across big, deep, and inexpensive gingerbread people cookie cutters at our local City Star (like a dollar / discount store back home), I knew exactly what we’d use them for!

We started off by making a double batch of our yummy-smelling no-cook gingerbread play dough. Then, we retrieved our cookie cutters and some trinkets to decorate the gingerbread people, just like we used in our gingerbread people play dough station. My job was flattening the mass of dough fairly uniformly {keeping it nice and thick}, flipping it over to reveal the smooth non-handprinty side…

And pressing the cutters down into the dough.

Miss G had the really fun job…

Decorating the people once I’d punched them out.

Her people were hilariously cute and she was great about making sure she really pushed the decorations down into the dough so that they would stick.

When she was done with them, I’d carefully slide them into plastic gift bags…

Wrap a rubber band tightly around the top, and add a bow tied of ribbon on top.

Cute, right? And I love that because the cookie cutters are deep and the play dough fills them completely, when rolled out flat, the dough will be able to make several gingerbread people cutouts! Hopefully these simple gingerbread people play dough and cookie cutter gifts will bring a little holiday cheer to our Dunes kids when they find them on their doorsteps this afternoon. ☺